WASHINGTON — The launch of several cubesats by an American company without authorization from a federal agency has the rest of the industry worried of a potential regulatory and public relations backlash. IEEE Spectrum first reported March 10 that Swarm Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based startup operating in stealth mode, flew four picosatellites as secondary payloads on an Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle in January. The SpaceBee satellites were identified in materials by the Indian space agency at the time as “two-way satellite communications and data relay” satellites, but did not…

As SpaceX‘s Elon Musk continues to track his red roadster’s journey into deep space, he’s also preparing to launch something far more practical. On Thursday, SpaceX will launch a pair of prototype satellites intended to form the basis for Starlink, a constellation of about 11,000 satellites that would beam broadband internet down to Earth. Thursday’s launch – originally slated for Wednesday but put on hold because of “high altitude wind shear” – marks the first big step in Musk’s plan for “rebuilding the internet in space,” as he put it…

TORONTO — A United Nations committee reached agreement last week on nine guidelines intended to reduce the risk of collisions in space and other harmful space activities. The non-binding guidelines, approved by a working group of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the UN’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), are intended to improve the long-term sustainability of space. They join 12 other guidelines on the topic approved by the committee in 2016. Speaking at the Canadian SmallSat Symposium here Feb. 13, David Kendall, chairman of COPUOS,…

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Planet and Spire, operators of the two largest commercial cubesat constellations in orbit, say they manage their fleets to prevent retired spacecraft from lingering in space beyond internationally accepted guidelines. Speaking at the SmallSat Symposium here Feb. 7, officials from Planet and Spire said the companies have self-imposed rules to ensure their satellites burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within 25 years of shutting down, as suggested by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination (IADC) committee. Earth-observation company Planet has 200 satellites in low Earth orbit, making its…

WASHINGTON – A former Obama administration official is optimistic that the Trump administration will continue to pursue the development of non-binding international agreements to promote norms of behavior in outer space. In a Feb. 1 speech at a U.S.-Japan space policy forum here, Frank Rose, chief of government relations at the Aerospace Corporation and a former assistant secretary of state and deputy assistant secretary for space and defense policy, said he was encouraged by statements by administration officials calling for continued development of such agreements on issues like orbital debris…

This op-ed originally appeared in the Jan. 15, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine. Last year, in the space of a few months, four geostationary satellites failed in orbit. Each had reached, or exceeded, its design life. Each incident created, or posed a high risk of creating, debris that could endanger other satellites; debris that could linger for thousands of years. This alarming string of failures didn’t stop the U.S. Federal Communications Commission — at the end of November — from authorizing SES to move its AMC-1 satellite and operate it…

How the military views outer space and cyberspace as battlefronts in future wars are likely topics in the administration’s new national defense strategy. WASHINGTON — Space and cyber warfare moved up the national security priority list during the Obama administration, and are expected to rank even higher under the Trump presidency. Details on how the military views outer space and cyberspace as battlefronts in future wars should emerge in the national defense strategy that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to unveil Friday. The national defense strategy — a forward-looking take on…

There is now believed to be an astonishing 170 million pieces of junk floating in Earth’s upper atmosphere, but only 22,000 are being tracked. Some 7,000 tonnes of space junk circle our planet, as defunct satellites, junk from rockets and other metals and rocks build up close to Earth. Technologies such as mobile phones, television, GPS and weather related services rely on satellites, so a cataclysmic series of crashes could pose a threat to our already over-reliant need for satellites. As a result, China has announced a radicle plan to…

Chinese scientists have an audacious proposal to clean up Earth’s cluttered orbit using giant lasers to obliterate old satellites and other space junk. A paper, titled Impacts of orbital elements of space-based laser station on small scale space debris removal, by researchers at the Air Force Engineering University in China describes how space debris could be zapped into smaller, less-harmful pieces using space-based lasers. Space junk is an issue that has been occupying international space agencies for years, with NASA considering a variety of options to track, detect and remove man-made…

Space agencies around the world have been launching objects for decades, and a lot of them haven’t come back down. According to NASA, orbital debris, or “space junk,” is any object that’s no longer useful circling the earth. It can include spent rocket stages, retired satellites or fragments of debris from previous space missions. The U.S. Space Surveillance Network tracks about 21,000 orbiting pieces of debris larger than a softball. It’s also estimated there are millions of pieces of debris so small that they can’t be tracked. But they do…